I begin this lamentation by pointing out that America has given its populace and the world at large many positive things. Relations between the various ethnicities and between the genders have been reformed dramatically over the last 70 years, giving many the false impression that reform is the natural order of human progress.

Nope, war and a perpetual lust for dominance have been the norm rather than the exception throughout history. Personally, I think Darwin explained this a couple of centuries ago. Humanity evolved in the wilds of Earth as our thumbs and voices gave us the tools to slaughter and subjugate other species and other bands of homo sapiens.

That's who we are and unless we change our ways, that's how we'll destroy ourselves and much of the life around us. Our tools of dominance now include AI -- or as I call it, The Sorcerers' Apprentice.

Here in the USA, we have indulged this fantasy based on the limited examples of exceptional events like the freeing of the slaves and allowing labor unions to go on strike, and most of us believe that we are The Good Guys. So here is my corrective effort to remind myself and anybody of like mind of who we are as a society:

1. Constitution institutionalizes slavery and half the new states in the new union developed their economies with forced labor and everybody white shared in the benefit from it. Seven decades later, slavery was replaced by Jim Crow and Plessy v. Ferguson.

2.The new country systematically ethnic-cleansed the continent. The Supreme Court ruled in Fletcher v. Peck that the native inhabitants of America had no legal standing at all and no claim on the land they occupied before white people arrived here. Sounds like aggression to me. How about you?

3. While "taming the West," the new White People country ran into the not really white Mexicans. A little war shoved them aside. It was called Manifest Destiny as the map we know today was filled in with "states." Irish and Chinese workers were shipped in to build the railroads across the continent being tamed.

4. At the end of the 19th Century, we had a Splendid Little War with Spain, hoked up out of bullshit gaining new territory for us in The Land of the Free.

5. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson was re-elected POTUS on the slogan, "He kept us out of war." In 1917 he led us into "The War to End All Wars."

6. The New Deal -- FDR does not fit this paradigm perfectly. But, Smedley Butler. And don't forget the interment of the Japanese. Or The Bomb.

7. Korea, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, Iraq I, Afghanistan, Iraq II, Libya, Syria, blah, blah, blah, Ukraine, Gaza.

So what is new?